FTP Client on CentOS 6.0

[jlehtone]

scp, sftp, and rsync (now by default) actually all use same protocol for authentication and transfer: ssh. That is secure.

A radically different protocol would be mounting the remote filesystem via NFS, sshfs, samba. Then you would do a "local copy". I'd use rsync for that too.

There is a lot of text about rsync on the net and its manpage is extensive too.